Do You Really Need Kubernetes? Real‑World Opinions and Practical Insights

Answer 1 – "林英"

Many projects combine Spring Cloud with Kubernetes, deploying dozens of back‑end services and a large number of servers, yet their daily active users and data volume are modest. For such workloads, a few Spring Boot instances are sufficient, saving server and development costs; the push for decoupling and high concurrency is unnecessary.

Answer 2 – "泰酷啦"

The author advocates full containerization regardless of scale, even for three servers, and would install Kubernetes even on a single physical machine. Reasons include comparable cloud‑hosted master costs, reduced virtualization overhead, and simplified operations via

kubectl

. Example commands:

kubectl create deploy xx --image=xxx

kubectl expose deploy xx --type xx --target-port xx --port xx

kubectl scale deploy xx --replicas xx

kubectl edit ing ...

kubectl set image xxx app image=xxx

or

helm upgrade ...

With Kubernetes, many routine tasks (SSH, manual updates) disappear, and a small team can manage large workloads.

Answer 3 – Anonymous

The company has no dedicated ops team; the tech director only uses Docker to run images behind an SLB. When a container failed for two days, nobody noticed until a colleague checked logs. Scaling and troubleshooting required manual Nginx/SLB changes, highlighting the risks of minimal orchestration.

Answer 4 – "作死w"

Adopting Kubernetes without clear goals leads to unnecessary complexity. Teams must ask whether K8s solves a real problem, whether it is the best solution, and whether they are prepared for long‑term maintenance, CI/CD migration, and the required staffing.

Answer 5 – "runzhliu"

Kubernetes’ self‑healing automatically restarts failing containers, handling thousands of restarts per hour without users noticing service interruptions.

Answer 6 – "网瘾大爷"

Rotating 200+ nodes for cost optimization took only two days with Kubernetes, a task that would have required weeks of overtime without it, and reduced the risk of P0 incidents.

Answer 7 – "Chen Moore"

For small deployments (3–5 EC2 instances), the author prefers a simple Nginx front‑end to Spring Boot rather than Spring Cloud or Kubernetes, and would choose React/Vue + Next.js for the front‑end.

All quoted links are from Zhihu and do not represent the author’s own views.